All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Amok tuber.

Well, I guess we should have taken the symptoms a little more seriously. It seems the man-sized tuber has run amok. And there’s nothing more dangerous than a crazed root vegetable.

It’s a little hard to describe the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night (mind you, in space… it’s ALWAYS night) to find your spacecraft rolling end over end. My first thought was that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) had fallen asleep over his pulp novel and slumped over onto the navigational console. No, my friends… it was far worse than this. The man-sized tuber, who we thought was safely tucked away in his recuperative terrarium, had broken free of his restraints and taken his little cart on a joy ride through the control room, smashing delicate instruments with his big, knotty root-fists, and setting Mitch Macaphee’s lab shoes on fire. I dragged myself upstairs to see the unlikely sight of Matt, John, and Mitch wrestling the tuber into a corner and pouring cranberry juice down his gullet. (We’ve been using cranberry juice on the tuber as a natural calming agent. Not scientifically derived, you understand – just randomly chosen.)  

What do you do about a tuber run amok? John had an idea: lock him up with anti-Lincoln and let them fight it out over a game of Battleship. Now, I don’t want to discount this idea… it might just work. The question is, work at what? Hey, look… we’re headed (we hope) towards a string of relatively lucrative gigs on the planet Neptune, and the man-sized tuber has been drafted (in the absence of anyone with the relevant skill sets) into service as our sound man. How the hell are we going to sound without our cruciferous companion twiddling the knobs? I mean, this is desperation time, friends. We may or may not ever find our way out of this interplanetary field of stones, but man god damn, we have to bring that tuber back to his somewhat limited senses! Yes, that is how important our sound is. Oh yes – we are dedicated, people. Hear me say it. LET ME HEAR YOU SAY, “YEAH!!”

Whoops… okay, I wandered a bit. Slipping into the old stage jargon, too. My bad. Anyway, we thought John’s idea was worth a try. So into the aft cabin they went. Matt obligingly set up the Battleship board, and we locked the door behind them. A few hours passed. Not a noise emanated from within the chamber. I thought it prudent to, at least, peek inside and see how they were faring. Well, what I saw was not encouraging. Apparently, Anti-Lincoln had nearly sunk the man-sized tuber’s battleship. Still, he was not getting a rise out of tubey. Tubey was just sitting there like a potted plant (which, of course, he is kind of…. only without the pot). I tried to pull Anti-Lincoln’s attention away from the game, but it was no use. He was deep in the pon far – the “blood fever”. It happens every seven years. (Oh no, wait… that’s the Vulcan mating thing. My apologies. ) I’ll tell you what – for a guy straight out of the antimatter 19th century, he sure does love board games.

All right, maybe I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill. We can get Marvin to mix us. So what if it sounds like ass, right? Actually…. best not answer that. Wait ’til we get to Neptune, then speak.

Political Rants

Point taken.

Politics’ regular season has begun once again. We’ve been watching the training camp stuff all summer, and now it’s time to play for the money, I guess. I’m not great with sports analogies, so that’s as far as I’ll go. No, wait – I lied… President Obama had the opening pitch on Wednesday night (okay, that’s really it) and I’d say he did a pretty decent job of explaining what it is he wants to do. It doesn’t exactly comport with what I think needs to happen to bring the United States to a place where we behave like a civilized modern industrial nation, but it’s a bit clearer than it’s been up to now. While my inclination is to support this – particularly if it includes the so-called “public option” – I am a bit concerned about what this will mean for people who have no coverage at all, or just the sort of lousy coverage I used to carry years ago. I’d like to hear more about that interim period during which the uninsured receive “basic” health insurance. That seems a bit problematic, to say the least, in that it sounds like it would insure people who are more prone to illness (i.e. poor families) in the least effective and most expensive way available.

I’m here to tell you, I have had catastrophic policies before. I have also had standard individual indemnity policies. They pay for nothing. As long as you are healthy and lucky enough to remain out of the hospital, you will see not one dime out of these plans. They have enormous deductibles and don’t pay for any preventive care. From the insurer’s standpoint, that’s a great deal, if the insured doesn’t get badly ill. But if you end up in the hospital, they’re on the hook for some major medical costs – that’s why they tend to cap your benefits… to ensure that you don’t get too expensive in the throes of your misfortune. My first plan ever was a Mutual Of Omaha policy (actually, several policies) that worked like this – if you had a partially reimbursable expense (I never actually did, but it was theoretically possible), you pay for the care and they would send you a check…. eventually… maybe. It was kind of iffy, to say the least, and definitely set up to keep the money flowing in one direction – from you to Omaha.

The funny thing was, they were in the process of discontinuing this class of policy, presumably because it was not profitable. I’m not surprised, frankly. Any policy that encourages you to ignore your illnesses for as long as possible, to not receive any diagnostic care or testing, to avoid contact with health professionals who might actually help steer you in a positive direction (i.e. eat better, don’t smoke, etc.), is not going to have particularly good outcomes. People are going to get badly sick, discover illnesses at later stages (when treatment tends to be most expensive), and ultimately cost more than those who receive strong preventive care. That, I think, is one of the traps the Obama health plan might fall into – offering minimal care to people who can’t afford better, even though that approach eventually costs more (and creates greater misery in the process). What the hell, we are the wealthiest, most powerful nation on Earth. It’s a scandal that almost 50 million people have no health coverage. We need to make certain people get the right kind of care, because it’s the right thing to do. Oh, and it will save money besides.

So, hey… here’s an avid single-payer advocate saying, let’s encourage our legislators and our president to pass a bill that will help those most in need. Let’s put that stake in the ground – then we can start working on putting a stake through the heart of this ludicrous privatized health insurance scam we call a “system”.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Blowed up good.


What the hell, man. Are you sure this is the way to Neptune? I mean, I don’t remember all of these asteroids. For chrissake, I feel like I’m flying through an eighties-vintage arcade video game.

Oh, hi. Glad you decided to check in at this moment. Maybe you could help us with a little navigational problem we seem to be having. Our usually capable mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee seems to have gotten us a little off the beaten path between Saturn and Neptune. I think the explanation is relatively simple – Zenite snuff, helpfully provided by our perpetual sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn. As mentioned previously, Mitch is – while brilliant – not the best space craft pilot even when sober. With a nostril full of that hot stuff from the Small Magellanic Cloud, I doubt he could find his way to the zero-gravity can. Anyway, he appears to have followed the wrong lode star or something on that order, and we are now dodging some of the biggest, lumpiest, nastiest looking asteroids I’ve seen in a couple of weeks, bar none. (We’re using all kinds of exotic evasive maneuvers, like the reverse double-back figure seven and the inverted stroke-six with change back from your twenty. Hey, look ’em up – I can’t explain how they work!)

Okay, so here we are – threading our way between hunks of jagged stone en route to a planet that is probably in another direction entirely. This in the wake of a string of thrashing performances on the big planet, Jupiter, from which we were unceremoniously ejected when it became known that Mitch Macaphee had caused the big impact from a few weeks back. (Some kind of avionics test, I believe – Matt’s talked to him about this kind of thing.) What went down? Well, our rented P.A. system, for one thing. The man-sized tuber had to abandon the mixing console when our Jovian patrons started tossing burning wads of methane gas at him. (Tubey simply isn’t used to the plain-clothes club scene.) Marvin (my personal robot assistant) helped wheel the tuber out of harm’s way, but that didn’t keep the main speaker array from tumbling over into the orchestra pit. As a scholar once said, it blowed up real good. Oh, the horror… the horror.

In any case, the Jupiteranians (or Jovians or whatever the hell) drove us out at the point of a flaming pitchfork, as it were. Mitch’s little avionics experiment produced a titanic ‘splosion, we gather, and that has a tendency to piss folks off. There was screaming and gnashing of teeth, and that’s just amongst the band members. Those extraterrestrials have a whole sockful of different ways to express their anger, many having to do with the emission of high-intensity radiation. We all got out alive, thank whomsoever, though I think the man-sized tuber may have sustained some minor psychological injuries. We may even be talking post traumatic stress disorder. He’s been sitting in front of the only Web-enabled computer in our spacecraft, staring at the e-Bay listing for an enormous zucchini. (He has a kind of longing look in his “eyes” – it worries me, frankly.)

Hey, tubey – forget the zucchini of your dreams for a few minutes and man the navigation console. Tubey! Jesus H. Frankenberry… Is there a vegetable psychiatrist in the house?